Black Women, Mass Incarceration, and the Legacies of Slavery
“They shipped me off just like they captured and shipped off my ancestors,” Susan Burton recalled, describing her experience entering California’s prison system. Her journey began in 1982 in the dark hours of the morning with a wake-up call from the sheriff. “Get up, Burton. You’re being transported,” he ordered. Susan’s journey took her from a county jail to a women’s prison, where she would spend years fighting for her freedom, but not before enduring a strip search and dehumanizing commands: “Open your mouth. Lift up your tongue. Pull your ear back. Lift up your arms. Let me see the soles of your feet. Bend over and cough.” Her body was examined as if she were an enslaved person being readied for the auction block, then branded with a state-issued uniform with “Property of the State of California” stamped across the back. Then came the chains. “I was put in chains around my ankles and around my wrists, and I was marched out into a line on a bus,” she told me.
After being designated as state property and given a number to replace her name, Susan was compelled to labor. “They classified me for work,” she recalled. The prison authorities assessed her based on perceived physical abilities, which resulted in long hours spent raising chickens, mowing grass, and working in the “Big House”—a term incarcerated individuals often use for prison. Susan received very little pay for her time. “They paid me eight cents an hour to keep up the prison, which doubled as the plantation, historically, and if I didn’t cooperate and work, I would be put in the hole or solitary confinement,” she reflected. “But in slavery days, I would have gotten whipped or put into the hot box.”
For Susan, serving time mirrored the harsh realities of chattel slavery. “It’s just a twenty-first century replication of the eighteenth century,” she concluded. Before meeting Susan Burton and learning about her role as the founder of A New Way of Life Reentry Project, a national organization advocating for the freedom of and justice for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women, I had never heard a Black woman describe her imprisonment as a form of enslavement. Despite decades of researching the impact of slavery’s legacies on Black women, I had not grasped how deeply this reality persists today, nor how long this has been the case. Since the earliest years of America’s founding, systems of incarceration and slavery have worked together to keep Black women bound. Since hearing Susan’s remarkable story and acute analysis, I have been on a quest to uncover the relationship between mass incarceration and slavery.
This journey has led me to archives and libraries all over the United States, from Mississippi to Washington, DC. It has also taken me inside the living rooms of safe houses for women returning from prison and into jail classrooms that serve as chapels, where women gather to pray, testify, and tell their stories. Interviewing survivors and learning about their stories made me reflect on the lives of the enslaved, particularly the experiences of those who suffered from imprisonment. It is sobering to realize that between 1810 and 1865 alone, an estimated one million enslaved people experienced incarceration in America’s jails and prisons. At least one-third of them were women.
While writing this book, I realized that since the beginning of the United States, mass incarceration has been a persistent reality for Black Americans, even while hidden in the shadow of slavery. In fact, what started as an effort to highlight the invisibility of Black women ultimately revealed deeper insights about mass incarceration and slavery. These revelations have led me to ask new questions: What role did slavery play in the establishment of mass incarceration? How have these systems evolved over time? How does slavery’s legacy of mass incarceration continue to affect the lives of Black Americans today? I contemplated these questions as I searched through historical documents for answers, discovering some buried in nineteenth-century slave jail ledgers and runaway dockets (lists of individuals jailed for escaping slavery), others in prison registers and receipts for hiring enslaved chain gang laborers, and still others in city and county jail rosters. I read slave narratives, fugitive slave ads, freedom suits (lawsuits filed by enslaved individuals seeking freedom), and other records from the chattel slavery era.
I uncovered other answers in post-Emancipation slave auction advertisements, convict leasing contracts, prison plantation records, whipping reports, reward posters, peonage case files (records documenting the enslavement of Black individuals for unpaid criminal fines and debts), parole contracts, census records, and personal narratives. The personal narratives of Black women currently affected by mass incarceration have been crucial in helping me understand this history. I rely on their ability to express the unspoken and undocumented struggles of their incarcerated ancestors, as they are the only ones capable of articulating what it means to be both a prisoner and a slave and to navigate life as a citizen in chains. Their testimonies shed light on the challenges Black women faced in the past while also giving voice to the experiences of those now incarcerated in a system often called the new Jim Crow. Today, the term “Jim Crow” is used to describe our modern-day system of mass incarceration, regarded by many as a new form of racial caste.
Copyright © 2026 by Talitha L. LeFlouria. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
